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There’s an open source web conferencing project gaining popularity over at SourceForge. It looks to be a very interesting project and promises a lot of features. Unfortunately, it’s currently in alpha and seems to be rough around the edges still. However, if they can deliver everything they promise with ease of use, installation and a cost effective hosted solution, then they will have many small business owners waiting in line.

There is another audience they could also be targeting. Many web sites are still run by hobbyists and non-technical individuals. Having to go over to SourceForge, downloading something and then installing it on a web server is beyond a lot of site owners. A simple hosted solution where people just need to cut and paste a few lines of code would be great; this is in the plans according to the demo. The question is how much will it cost and what features will it have?

While not directly comparable in feature set, Userplane has many different price points depending on usage with or without ad support. 1videoConference could do the same with a tiered pricing structure and feature set. Want a plain video presentation hosted platform? Get it with ads for free. Need a video conference system with no ads? It’s a nominal price of x dollars a month. Want the whole enchilada with whiteboard support and collaborative tools? That will be an additional fee, thank you very much…

We will keep an eye on this one and see how it develops and differentiates itself from the others.